Alloy
by Degeneration
Summary: Glitch has been told that he has a heart of gold. He doesn't think that's a compliment. Glitch/Cain


The dim light of the sun shone through the tiny windows at the very peak of the tower. By the time it had traveled all the way down to the inhabitable floors, it was already weak and easily overpowered by the eerie turquoise light beneath the glass case in which Ambrose's brain floated. The case was the strongest source of light in the room, filtering and refracting through the hundreds of tiny bubbles rising through the solution inside. It formed a strange sort of halo around the hemisphere of the brain inside.

The effect was rather beautiful, Glitch thought, and he found that inherently wrong. It wasn't supposed to be beautiful. It was supposed to be hideous, and while it was, in a way, he couldn't deny its abstract loveliness. He decided that fact was almost more disturbing than its actual function. Almost.

"Hey, there, you." He paused. That pronoun was always problematic. "Me." He shook his head and settled for, "Us." It wasn't perfect. It never was. The brain wasn't a 'you'; it was very much still connected to him. But it wasn't _part _of him, not anymore. Since the debrainment, he had begun evolving as his own purpose, beyond the severe lack of anything that had seemed to define him in the first months after the lobotomy. Ambrose's brain – he would always think of it as Ambrose's, even while he shared it with him – had kept their past and learned the pain of science. Glitch had lost their past and learned the pain of the heart. They were different now, even though they were the same, and even if 'us' didn't quite cover the impossible _thing _that they had become, it was as close as he could get with his patchy vocabulary and the limited language that he had to work with. He sighed deeply and brushed off the thin layer of dust that had formed on the glass since his last visit.

Even after the rest of the tower had been taken to pieces and put to new purposes, partly by his own hands, the brain room remained untouched. After the discovery that the half of his brain kept alive by Azkadellia couldn't be returned to his skull, nobody quite knew what to do with it. They kept it around, though, partly because it was useful on rare occasions when Raw could peel out information for the queen, and partly because nobody had the heart to lock it up or get rid of it when it was still distantly part of Glitch. Still, that didn't mean that anybody wanted to be around it. The denizens of the palace avoided it like the plague. The vast majority of the time, the room was still and silent, save for the near imperceptible humming whine of its machinery pumping electricity through the brain's old synapses.

Then again, the vast majority of the palace's citizens weren't related to the brain. They didn't feel its magnetic pull, tugging at them like a hook cast and caught deep into their ribcages. They didn't feel the moment of static that fizzled through their fingertips when they touched the glass face that allowed them to peer at the grey, labyrinthine turns of the brain's many sulci and the gyri in between. They didn't feel a lump in their throats for an instant upon first seeing it and instantly knowing, Knowing beyond a doubt that it was theirs. They didn't feel anything at all, beyond a touch of guilt and a twist of pity. Glitch felt everything. He always did. That was the problem.

With another sigh, he rubbed absently at the line of skin surrounding his zipper. He let himself settle down onto the floor, leaning against the thick pedestal that held up the brain case. "I think I've been thinking again." He never could be sure. He could have been thinking, it was possible. He still did that, despite what people assumed of him from his zippered scalp. But it was equally likely that he had heard this 'thought' from someone else or read it in a book, only to forget the source and subject and have it reoccur to him as a brilliant epiphany. He'd seen it happen before. Only last week he'd been halfway through discovering a new method to combine mauritanium and palantious elements before Cain had quietly pointed out that it had been invented sixty years before. "I think… I think I have," he repeated.

His voice echoed slightly in the huge emptiness of the metal room. He wasn't surprised that he was the only one that had ventured inside the brain room voluntarily in the months after the witch's downfall. Rather, what surprised him was how frequently he found himself returning to the room. It was a slow change. He'd refused to go near it for the first three weeks after they'd discovered that a rebrainment surgery was impossible. Finally he'd returned to yell at his former brain, and soon enough, he was returning weekly, daily, whenever necessary. It was comforting, in a strange way. Everyone else talked about their problems with other people. Glitch talked about them with himself.

"Everyone keeps saying these weird things. I think they're compliments." He paused, then tilted his head. "I think they think they're compliments. I mean, I don't think they think I think that they're the only ones that think they're compliments." He fell silent for a moment, frowning, as he tried to parse out that jumble of a sentence that had just escaped his lips. "I think." After a moment, he rubbed his nose. "You know what I mean."

And he was convinced that Ambrose's brain did, despite any evidence to the contrary. There was no response whatsoever to his words. The brain floated peaceably in the ionized solution, the bubbles rose at the same speed they always did, and the hum didn't change pitch. He knew, of course, that the brain couldn't hear him. It only understood electrical current and signals anymore, after fifteen annuals of being pumped for information that way. There was no chance that human voices would be intelligible at all, especially without ears to filter the sound through. But if it could hear him, Glitch knew he would understand.

"DG does it all the time. And the queen. Apple never falls far from the… queen," he finished lamely. He had the image in his head, that big green leafy thing, all arms and waving and smelling good in the sun, but for the life of him, the word had completely disappeared. He tugged on one of the loose strings that hung from the hem of his sleeve, then persistently pushed on.

"They do it a lot. They mean well." That he was sure of. DG would never say anything to hurt him, not on purpose. And the queen – well. The queen still didn't really think of him as Glitch, not really. He would always be not-Ambrose. Broken-Ambrose. Bits-of-Ambrose. Sometimes, only when he was connected to Ambrose's brain through the hands of Raw, he was a person again. Then she would smile at him again, praise his brilliance. He knew she probably didn't even notice that she was doing it, treating him like a biography with all the pages ripped out. She wouldn't try to hurt him, either, but DG was better at not hurting him than she was. It only made him feel guiltier for nursing wounds from their attempts at kind words.

In fact, the only one of his friends that had yet to really offend him with some well-meant comment was Cain. That might have surprised other people, considering his rather short, terse demeanor. It didn't surprise Glitch. He knew that Cain understood what it was like to be trapped, to have bits of yourself ripped away. Cain was the only one who didn't try to fix him. He just stuck with him. Glitch appreciated that. There were so few things that stuck with him; even his mind ran away from him. Cain would never say the sorts of things that DG and the others said.

"Do you know what she said? She said..." he broke off with a frown as the memory slipped out of his head like sand between his fingers. "… I hope you _do _know what she said, because I don't think I do." He dropped his head back against the iron pedestal with a thunk and the faint clink of his zipper. "She said…" He closed his eyes and rubbed at his face. It would come to him. Maybe. He'd remembered the last code for the anti-Sunseeder, hadn't he? All by himself. He could remember a silly little comment.

At least, that was what he told himself until he forgot what he was trying to remember. Then he crossed his hands in his lap and gazed around the brain room in pensive silence. "I built something today, you know," he told Ambrose's brain. As happened only too frequently, when his mind lost his train of thought, it picked up another on a completely different track. "I made a lamp on a clock. It turns itself on at sunset and off at sunrise." He allowed himself a moment of pride before sighing. "I didn't make it up on the spot. I used one of your – our – books of blueprints. But still! I made it! And it works!" He'd tried it himself that evening, clapping to himself and grinning widely when the lightbulb had made a little 'tzzt' sound before flicking on. "It just… took me two weeks."

He knew without a doubt that before his debrainment he could have constructed the simple machine in under an hour, and he would have made it more efficient and elegant, too. But he would take the small victories he could get. He didn't know if he would ever be the miraculous inventor he had been before the surgery. He was trying to stay hopeful, though. When he'd reopened his old workshop three months ago, he'd blown up his first project, as well as the next two. But he was getting better with practice. He thought that his fingers still remembered what to do, even if the parts of his brain that would have remembered were gone. It was like he had suddenly gone blind and he was forced to feel the contours out of everything he had once known with a single glance. It took him countless hours to do the same work he could have done without a thought, but he was making progress.

"I showed it to DG and Cain." Of his friends, those two were the more interested in his inventions. Raw was never one to discuss mechanics with. DG was constantly pestering him about his work at every chance she got. Cain never brought it up, but let Glitch come to him with his stories of success and failure. "They liked it. DG said it was a step in the right direction."

DG said. That reminded him of something else he'd been meaning to talk to Ambrose's brain about for a while. "Do you remember that thing DG said a while ago?" he restarted, unaware that he had even begun this conversation only minutes before. "When she said we have a heart of gold?" He frowned, twirling and tugging at one of the curling strands of hair that flopped over his eyes. "I don't think I like that. She does. I think she meant it as a compliment. But I don't want a heart of gold."

He knew the value of gold, of course. It was prized in the O.Z., though not as much as the Other Side. "I know it's shiny, and I know it's expensive. But…" here he frowned and chewed at his lower lip, "it's soft. And squishy. It gets dented and squeezed around and bent out of shape so quickly." He stared down at the dark iron floor. "It's weak. It's shiny and pretty, but it always gets hurt."

And that was the crux of it. Gold was one of the most attractive metals, but it was next to impossible to use in its pure state. Even jewelry that would see the most gentle of use would find it scuffed and bent within mere weeks. And he was no piece of costume jewelry, being worn for a night of dancing before being placed away in a velvet box. He'd been battered and bruised and run to the edge of the world and back. He knew DG was right, as much as he hated it – his heart was made of gold. Even if he couldn't remember exactly how every cut got there, it didn't mean they went away.

"I need to be an alloy." He traced one finger along the glass in endless circles, frowning as he did so. "Nothing gold can stay. It gets destroyed." He knew the process of alloy creation; he'd done it himself a few times. It reduced the purity of the gold, but only by a little. And there wasn't much use to pure gold that wouldn't even survive being used. A little bit of purity was a worthy sacrifice. Gold alloys could withstand attack. They were protected from the inside, down to the very basic molecular level. They could be beaten and scraped and tossed aside, but they would stay strong, shining like the day they were made. "I need some copper, or iron, or nickel, or tin."

His finger froze mid-loop on the glass. "…Tin…" He raised his head slowly, staring into the case at the silent brain. After a few moments of surprise, he pressed his hand to the glass in a wordless thanks to Ambrose's brain, then scrambled downstairs to go find some tin.


End file.
